Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Sony announced announced specification changes to its Stacked CMOS Image Sensors IMX135 and IMX134 and the camera modules based on these sensors, IU135F3-Z and IU134F9-Z, which are scheduled for phased launch starting January 2013.

Sony will switch their color coding to a RGB instead of originally announced "RGB-W coding", as it has failed to meet "certain conditions of Sony's image quality standards".

hmm, I've heard that there are some yield issue of Stacked Sensors due to W2W bonding alignment and thermal problem after bonding, but not sure whether those problem are related to the RGB-W structure.

Maybe IP issues ? During ISE2012 in London, Sony presented their solution to the incompatibility between RGB-W and existing software and processing tools relying on the Bayer pattern. They converted the RGB-W first to Bayer RGB and then further processed the data by existing tools. Simple, but cleaver !

The SAD thing here is that a company like Sony does not bother to check that their RGBW works before publishing their big PR a few weeks ago.At the same time Nokia fooled the world with the fake movies. Now they came out with AMAZING low light performance using an OIS but they forgot to tell the world that the low light performance is mainly achieved by exposure of 1/3 sec. YES that is 333 milliseconds. It does wonders on static scenes but even a static person that is breathing will appear blurry in the images.

RGBW is useful. But there are tradeoffs and I think it has not been clear if the tier 1 handset makers would accept the tradeoffs or not. The density of W pixels is also an important parameter and I think Sony was pretty aggressive on this parameter. It could be that in another generation or so of pixel shrink RGBW will become more acceptable.